


The Hurt I Hide Fuels The Fire Inside Me

by SSDriscool



Category: Hawkeye (Comics), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies), The Defenders (Marvel TV), Venom (Movie 2018)
Genre: Basically 616 Clint/MCU mash, Bisexual Clint Barton, Bisexual Matt Murdock, Deaf Clint Barton, Depression, F/M, Fraction Hawkeye, Gen, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, M/M, Marvel 616/MCU Crossover, No shipping actually takes place in the making of this fic, Pansexual Eddie Brock, Post-Avengers: Infinity War Part 1 (Movie), Post-Daredevil s3, Post-Venom (Movie 2018), just references, like a lot of them, not that it really matters
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-14
Updated: 2019-02-14
Packaged: 2019-10-28 08:43:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,736
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17784200
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SSDriscool/pseuds/SSDriscool
Summary: Clint snorted at his own joke since there was no one else around to do it for him, or more than likely roll their eyes. He really missed Kate. He missed Natasha, too, because they both were still walking and breathing, and yet he had never felt further from her in distance or connection. The same could be said about Bobbi but that feeling had cropped up before the snap. Happy damn Valentine’s day, Clint couldn’t help but cheer in his head as he pushed up from the mattress thrown on the floor. He had wanted to go back to bed as soon as he figured out the date, but he itched to feel the tension of a bowstring and to feel a soreness in his body that wasn’t from lying idle for too long.Phil futzing Coulson was alive, too. Like still, still alive. The man had not only survived an unhinged self-proclaimed God but the snap, too. And Clint’s face still twisted with a grimace of regret about how their last conversation had gone down. His feelings had simply been to raw then. The invite to stay grouped together had felt like a punch to the gut. What good would grouping together do them now?





	The Hurt I Hide Fuels The Fire Inside Me

**Author's Note:**

> I love ( comic ) Clint Barton with my entire being and relatively enjoy the MCU. However, I don't enjoy the MCU's characterization of him nor the Ronin storyline. This is my attempt to rectify that.
> 
> Just to make sure things are clear, too, the timeline would be Venom/DD S3 happening sometime after CW and then Infinity War. The story picks up months after the snap. 
> 
> No beta-reader.

Divorced, deaf, and some say _a traitor_ or even... dumber than a box of bricks. If they wanted to be an **asshole** about it and make his head ring with the reminder of his father. His fingers always itched to turn the volume down on the world at times like those.

You get brainwashed **one** time. _~~You forget to bring the bottle opener the **first** time~~_.

Or get stuck in an air vent once after hastily stashing your bow and quiver too far deep in it, and suddenly an _entire_ organization thought you lived in the damn things. Sometimes he closed his eyes and imagined going back to a time before Tony ignited the fuse on _nesting in the vent_ jokes. Maybe just back far enough when there **were** enough people around for his annoyance at it to be a common thing. Nowadays it was just him and his bow. And maybe his brother was still somewhere out there, he didn’t know. Half the population of the futzing universe was gone. But really... everyone was gone. No one still here was still _really_ here.

Or perhaps that was just Clint. The disconnect between him and everyone else had been there before the snap, coming and going as it pleased. Now it felt like a bottomless void. Luckily, there was never any disconnect between him and his target. As long as he was standing. Breathing. Controlling the way his muscled coiled and released with the vibration of a bowstring, he never missed. Thanos couldn’t take that away from Clint.

Well... that’s untrue. The balls for chin bastard could blow his arms up into confetti with the snap of his fingers.

The thought made Clint shiver, and he forced it away as fast as it came. His hand raised to finally turn on his hearing aid and let the noise in because sometimes he was too much even for himself. The whole laying low thing was really starting to get to him. Coffee had never been in shorter supply.

What could he do though? It was all Clint could ask himself as the world became noisy once more, loud and yet empty, too.

He was sure he was left behind because the snap had wiped out those that would be a true threat to Thanos’ peace. Of course, he had nothing to prove that but his intuition. The damn gauntlet could reshape the universe, who’s to say it couldn’t read Thanos’ intent and desires with however it worked?

All he knew was that Kate was gone. Peter. Luke Cage. T’Challa. Dr. Strange. Most of the damn X-Men but like three. Not including Wanda, and Clint couldn’t help but hold on to some childish hope that her passing meant she got to be reunited with her brother. The list went on and on and each name that Clint learned and memorized and repeated to himself made their chances seem all the more hopeless.

It wasn’t that Clint saw the ones that survived as helpless in all this mess. They could take care of themselves just fine, unlike him it seemed. The most recent abandoned loft he had made his safe house much more of a mess than when he had found it... But you put everyone still alive all together in one big pile to _spark the rebellion_ and you’d have yourself a better emo rock band on your hands than a god damn **team** meant to lead the resistance. Save and right the _entire universe_. The idea of it alone gave him a headache. But the smartass in him was holding onto a small hope that they’d get through this if only so he could see how the stakes could possibly raise themselves any higher. It had gotten past his paygrade years ago.

Clint snorted at his own joke since there was no one else around to do it for him, or more than likely roll their eyes. ~~He really missed Kate~~. He missed Natasha, too, because they both were still walking and breathing, and yet he had never felt further from her in distance or connection. The same could be said about Bobbi but that feeling had cropped up before the snap. Happy damn Valentine’s day, Clint couldn’t help but cheer in his head as he pushed up from the mattress thrown on the floor. He had wanted to go back to bed as soon as he figured out the date, but he itched to feel the tension of a bowstring and to feel a soreness in his body that wasn’t from lying idle for too long.

Phil futzing Coulson was alive, too. Like still, _still_ alive. The man had not only survived an unhinged self-proclaimed God but the snap, too. And Clint’s face still twisted with a grimace of regret about how their last conversation had gone down. His feelings had simply been to raw then. The invite to stay grouped together had felt like a punch to the gut. What good would grouping together do them now?

What good could they do in this world in any form of the damn word? The entire universe was disorder being suffocated by the thinnest veil of _order_ and tyranny. It made him nauseous on a good day and there weren’t many of those lately.

Clint’s resting expression ( bitch face as Bobbi had eloquently dubbed it ) shifted into a hard frown when he noticed the small silver dog bowl knocked into a corner. How long had that been here? How long had he been sleeping here without even noticing it? The sight made his chest tremble with a deep, uneven breath and he tried his hardest not to think about his favorite one-eyed dog. Favorite dog, period.

He mostly failed. Until the room felt too small and the grief that had started like a faucet drip threatened to become a tsunami. Clint grabbed his kit in a hurry while barely remembering to grab a shirt, and then he rushed out of the four-story apartment and went straight for the roof. He needed fresh air. He needed to make sense of something, _shoot_ something.

The worn shirt he had thrown on before heading to the roof did little to keep him warm, and Clint was reminded how much he liked avoiding archery in the cold. His endurance for it lessened to an annoying degree when it hurt to breathe and it felt like his fingers would freeze off. Thankfully, it wasn’t nearly that cold. And for a moment, Clint let himself think back fondly on the few missions he had suffered through in below freezing weather. All for the greater good. But what did that matter now?

Clint was quick to let his mind go empty as he focused on the cutting sound of the February breeze and nocked an arrow. He waited for the wind to cut down, then shift a little to the right. Pulled back on the bowstring and...

“What the fuck...!?” The blond shouted and jumped back. The ink black slimeball of a face shifting and parting to avoid the arrow he accidentally let go. The archer’s blue eyes going even wider when he realized there was a man attached to... whatever the damn thing was. Obviously, alien in nature, and if he had to guess the actual human stranger was the thing’s host. Which was just what he needed in his life right now.

“Clint..?”

He spun on his heel at the sound of his name coming from behind him and his startled expression became one of confusion. What the hell was Daredevil doing here? No matter what, it was good to see a familiar face that he could add onto the list of still alive. Especially after almost being frightened into a heart attack. Clint glanced back when he heard the stranger and his... slime thing grumbling to each other.

“How can I help you, fellas?” Clint asked. His hand coming to a stop when he realized he’d been raising it to scratch at his head, while still holding his bow in it. Maybe he should have gotten more sleep.

Instead of giving him an immediate answer, the Devil of Hell’s Kitchen finally sated his long-held, unspoken curiosity by taking the cowl off and... “Oh... Murdock. You’re the lawyer who helped me with...”

“Yeah.” Matt answered before he finished. His greeting grin seemed much more dim and haunted than Clint remembered it being. But that was to be expected.

“And then we spent the night cel...” Clint carried on because sometimes he didn’t know when to stop talking. He just hoped these two hadn’t come for the reason he suspected.

“Yes, that too...” Matt interrupted again, and this time there's a hint of laugh lines around his eyes. The same ones Clint had spent a night memorizing. “I hope we aren’t disturbing but we wanted to talk... That’s Eddie Brock, and Venom. Rogers sent us to find you. He wants to get everyone together, get a plan together.”

Well, futz him. Of course, he had been right. Leave it to Steve Rogers to want to get the band back together for one last hurrah.

“I’m in.” He said before he even realized it. The incredibly impossible odds of getting to put an arrow in Thanos’ eye and strip him of the gauntlet far more appealing than going back to that empty room, to that empty dog bowl, and to his empty life.

At the end of the day, Clint would rather go down swinging for someone else’s beliefs before he lost to the circular routine of his own mind. And it seemed time was running out before they were all likely driven off the end of the tracks, one way or another.

“Glad to have you aboard.” Matt replied with an answering grin and Clint’s returning smile was thin and weary. Luckily, the lawyer couldn’t tell and Brock was too busy bickering with Venom about something he paid no mind to.  
  
_“No, V. You can’t take a bite out of his ass...”_ Eddie grumbled under his breath. Too frazzled by recent events to care about appearances anymore and speak to Venom mentally. He was never more happy to have the symbiote around so Venom was never really out of sight, anymore. The familiar and annoying lack of understanding of social graces on Venom’s part a welcomed distraction in the hellhole they lived in.

**Author's Note:**

> Hope you enjoyed reading! Constructive criticism is always welcomed.


End file.
